With the rise in technology has come to decline in security, and President Trump’s chief of staff is learning this the hard way.

A new report from POLITICO outlines how Kelly’s personal cell phone was compromised for the first several months of his time in the administration, raising questions as to who was behind it. The discovery also raises the question of what, if any, data the hackers were able to obtain from Kelly’s phone, which was rarely used for work related to his high security post within the President’s administration.

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According to POLITICO, tech support staff for the White House learned of the intrusion when General Kelly had them look at his phone after it had been functioning improperly for some time. Kelly relied mainly on his government-issued phone for sensitive work matters, but still kept his personal phone at times.

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A White House spokesman said Kelly hadn’t used the personal phone often since joining the administration. This official said Kelly relied on his government-issued phone for official communications.

The official, who did not dispute any of POLITICO’s reporting on the timeline of events or the existence of the memo, said Kelly no longer had possession of the device but declined to say where the phone is now.

Kelly has since begun using a different phone, one of the officials said, though he relies on his government phone when he’s inside the White House.

Several government officials said it is unclear when — or where — Kelly’s phone was first compromised. It also is unclear what data might have been accessed, if any.

…

Staffers reviewed the cellphone for several days and tried to decipher what had happened to it, the officials said. Many functions on the phone were not working.

The IT department concluded the phone had been compromised and should not be used further, according to the memo.

While the source of the hack has yet to be determined, one can’t help but wonder if it was a part of the larger alleged spying operation on President Trump and members of his campaign by the Obama administration. According to a report from the Independent, the CIA has a program called “Weeping Angel,” which allows the agency to turn cell phones into listening devices while remotely operating their camera feature.

A division of the US spying agency is built to explore vulnerabilities in gadgets and use them to listen in on their owners, according to new documents made public by Julian Assange.

“The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell’s 1984, but “Weeping Angel”, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization,” the organisation wrote in a release.

The Weeping Angel attack would be able to infiltrate smart TVs and make them appear to be turned off, according to WikiLeaks. In that state, they could listen in on everything that people were saying around them, the report claims.

Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow with the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, stated his concern that whoever hacked Kelly’s phone may have done exactly what the CIA’s Weeping Angel was intended for. Marczak said the “worst case scenario” with Kelly’s phone would be that the intruders had “full access” to its camera and listening devices.

“The [attackers] I would be most worried about are nation-states or other actors who may have access to resale of commercial spyware sold to nation-states,” he said.

“The average user won’t notice anything at all. Really, the only way to pick up on that is to do forensics on the phone,” he added.

Which is exactly what the White House tech team is doing now.

While we still don’t know exactly who hacked General Kelly’s phone, we do know that the Obama administration went to great lengths to spy on President Trump throughout the election and during the transition. So it’s really not out of the realm of possibilities that it did the same once the President took office, considering there’s a full court blitz from the deep state to remove the President from office.

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